Chapter 19
The storm grate went first. It was a cast-iron grate set into the catch basin at the end of the cul-de-sac, heavy enough that two men would grunt lifting it, and it went straight up into the air like somebody had kicked it from underneath. Black foaming sulfur water came up behind it in a column, stinking of rotten eggs and chemicals, and it fell back down across the street in a hissing sheet that sent all of us stumbling backward.
Vasquez shouted for everybody to get back, and Bennett was already on his radio, but the sound of the water was louder than both of them. The geyser didn't stop. It kept coming, pulsing out of the catch basin, and the lawn between my garage and Marlene's wall began to move. Not shake. Move. The whole shelf of grass rose and settled like a skin stretched over something hollow, like the yard was breathing. I had lived over that void for years and I had never seen it do that. I had felt the tremor through my boots a thousand times, but I had never watched the ground itself go elastic.
The grate itself had landed halfway across the street, spinning once on the asphalt before it came to rest against the curb, and black water was running around it in a widening sheet. The smell got worse as it spread, sulfur and something chemical underneath it, sharp enough to make my eyes water. Neighbors were coming out onto their porches now, drawn by the noise, and Bennett waved them back with one arm while he talked into his radio with the other, calling for the fire department and the county emergency office and telling them, in that flat professional voice, that they had a hazardous release and a possible ground failure at the end of the cul-de-sac.
I started toward the trench without thinking, because the shutoff was there, and because for five years my hands had been the only thing between this ground and disaster, and Vasquez caught me by the back of my jacket and hauled me up short.
"No!" she shouted in my ear. "Ray, no! You do not go near that line now! It's at full pressure and there's no vent! You'll get cut in half!"
She was right and I knew she was right, but standing there with my hands empty while the thing I had tended for years tore itself apart was the hardest part of the whole morning. The tape didn't hold it. The lead line was screaming at seventy pounds of unvented pressure straight through the tape, and the vulcanized rubber I had wrapped around the fracture on Tuesday split with a crack like a rifle shot, and a jet of black water tore out sideways, cutting a furrow through the mud and hammering against the base of Marlene's wall. The C-clamp held for a second longer, then it twisted in its seat and went spinning off into the dark, and the jet got wider. Brackish sludge, black as used motor oil, foamed out of the split casing and ran down the trench toward the street, mixing with the rain.
Marlene screamed something I couldn't hear over the water. Bennett grabbed her arm and pulled her back toward the cruiser. Vasquez had her flashlight out, playing it over the yard, and in that jerking light I could see what I had been afraid to see for years: the ground wasn't solid. It never had been. The whole cul-de-sac was a lid. A thin lid of dirt and grass and concrete, laid over a hole the county had drilled and then paved over and sold, and the pressure underneath it had finally found a way to remind us it was there.
The pump under my garage was screaming now, laboring against pressure it was never built to fight, and I knew what was coming next even before I saw it. The wall was going to move. The fence was going to move. Everything we had built on top of that lid was about to find out what it was really standing on.
"Everybody back!" Vasquez shouted again, and this time nobody argued. We stood in the rain at the edge of the cul-de-sac, soaked and shaking, and watched the yard I had spent five years of nights trying to hold together begin to come apart in front of us. The black water was still pulsing out of the catch basin, and somewhere under the street the old mine timbers were groaning under a weight they were never meant to carry, and the wall at the end of my trench was starting to move.